


Into that good night

by Innsmouth



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, Body Horror, Gen, temporary suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-07
Updated: 2014-01-07
Packaged: 2018-01-07 20:33:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1124085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Innsmouth/pseuds/Innsmouth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Seer of Void grows rapidly more impatient with the emptiness of her session, while the Rogue of Light leads hers to victory. Naturally, the Noble Circle takes note.</p><p> </p><p>Aspectswap AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Into that good night

**Author's Note:**

  * For [crookedbones](https://archiveofourown.org/users/crookedbones/gifts).



The rain is constant, streaming down the back of Rose’s neck and speckling the scope of her rifle with distorted droplets. It roars down in sheets, a perpetual barrage, as though some unseen sea has seen fit to strain itself through the angry clouds that loom overhead. Water floods her sneakers and drips from the ends of her hair as she picks her way along precarious catwalks and shuffles carefully across the listing decks of long-derelict ships. Her palms and knees are bruise-mottled and spotted with dozens of abrasions from hard falls on rusting steel.  
  
Veins of lightning course through the heavens, darting down to strike one hulk or the next, or to illuminate a ruined lighthouse in the middle distance in a stark flash of pale light. The Land of Rain and Wreckage is a desolate place, but not a silent one; thunder rumbles and snarls, reverberating through the air alongside the crash of storm-frenzied waves and the deep bass groans of straining metal. It sets Rose’s teeth on edge, and her irritation manifests in the potshots she takes at the bridges of decrepit dreadnoughts, blowing gaping holes in the heads of imagined adversaries.  
  
Whatever creatures the game had intended to reside in her tempestuous Land dwell there no longer; etchings scrawl across the darkened corridors of wallowing ships, faded by wear and water, illegible in the thin light of her hubtopband, but those who scratched them into the walls are absent. Rose traces a faint pictograph in the shape of a consuming void and moves on, rubbing specks of rust from her fingertips. She wonders briefly what sadistic algorithm saw fit to grant her an empty domain, a kingdom of spray and shadow, Dante’s descent performed by an absent cast.  
  
Her wandering takes her over and through wreck after wreck, past listing cruisers with crumpled bows and a destroyer gone stern-up in the dark and churning sea. It slips beneath the waves as she passes at a distance, scattered detritus bobbing to the surface. Rose pauses to watch for a moment before a line of red text scrolls across the projected screen of her hubtopband and her attention turns to whatever Dave has to say. It turns out to be nothing of consequence; the Land of Heat and Mirrors is apparently inhospitable as fuck and thus worthy of complaint. Being caught in LORAW’s foul weather makes her significantly less willing to toy with their errant Knight, and with a few terse sentences she directs the conversation elsewhere.  
  
Dave is irritable and pessimistic at their shared lack of clear objectives. Rose cannot fault him for that; the absence of set goals grates on her, as though they’ve been shunted into a maze for the sake of running through it. _Wait_ , she tells him. _It’s all we can really do. Who knows? Maybe we’ll suddenly be blessed by divine guidance from whichever gleefully contrary god is currently supervising our predicament._  
  
 _fuck this im talking to jade,_ he says, and stops pestering her. She closes Pesterchum and resumes her aimless pacing. Eventually weariness weighs too heavily on her to disregard, and she settles into a dark but relatively dry galley to snatch a few hours of sleep.  
  
Testing her newfound abilities proves too tempting a proposition to pass up, however, so she indulges herself. Her perception stretches beyond the immediate, or so she’s found, and the whispers at the edge of her hearing have a carefully reassuring quality to them that makes her wary regardless of their seeming benignity. _Seer_ , they say, _fairest Rose_ , and despite her wariness she listens, and learns, and tests the edges of her mind’s eye until possibility spreads out before her.  
  
The darker corners of the world unfurl, tender fronds of blooming blackness at the edges of her sight, and she sees the order of things that should not be. Her universe clicks into arcane configurations, mutilated geometry that would give Euclid screaming night terrors. Possibility flickers in turning corners, chance and fortune turning on their heads to show her the could-have-beens, the never-weres, the can-never-bes. She sees John arrange the wind in invisible tapestries, trailing coils in the atmosphere like water. She sees Jade contain the universe in her own rangy body, mass and matter brought to a singular point in all existence. She sees Dave, crimson-robed and meditative, leafing through time and eventuality as though turning the pages of an open book. She sees herself, burning bright and furious, a vanguard against the dying of the light; she sees herself a god.  
  
There is a flicker of something, some splinter of awareness, and she glimpses a vague orange blur as though she is looking through a water-washed window. When she reaches for it, it threads out into nothingness, and she is left thwarted amidst potential futures. Try as she might, it does not allow her to follow its course. Frustrated, she forces herself to move on and chase down other possibilities; to reach Tantalus-like for an impossible prize will do her no good.  
  
Rose wakes disoriented an hour later, images of what could be having given way to sprawling, midnight-colored Derse in her sleep. The dark planet is no friend to her, with agents of the Queen around every corner, and so she spends as little time on it as she can. Better that she meander through her Land, and perhaps in the course of her seemingly endless journey learn exactly what it is that she is supposed to be doing.  
  
The riddle of her consorts’ fate comes to an abrupt end with the crunch of tiny testudinate bones underfoot, sharp in the darkness. She raises her foot from the ruins of a beaked skull and thinks, _oh._ But her restlessness is rising, the whispers at the edges more tempting than ever, and she does not give the moment the gravity that perhaps she should.  
  
She kicks the bones aside and sits down to see.  
  
This time she does chase the flicker, determined to catch hold and perceive its true nature, and she is rewarded with a trickle of maybes and a flash of sun-striped pyramids in a barren Land. For a moment, the heat of this phantom desert is bright and hard against her skin, and before she can stop herself she takes a step forward into sliding sand that dissolves underfoot into rust-streaked metal. Then something bores heavy into the back of her skull, insistent, and in a guttering storm-light she sees a bed of deep-blue stone lashed by rain.  
  
Whispers tell her what to do from there, as she gathers herself and forges on through the howling tempest outside. A crumbling lighthouse beckons in the distance, and she trudges over steel and under rain to make the trek. Thunder booms overhead, and a bolt lances down from the heavens to strike at her destination. It gives her no pause. She is not one to quail from the weather.  
  
The stairs inside the lighthouse are rain-soaked and rickety, rusting through in places. They creak alarmingly when Rose sets her foot down on the bottommost step, and screech in protest as she ascends. With a shriek of twisting metal, a step buckles under her weight and falls, clattering loudly as it lands. Rose simply pulls her foot back up, heedless of the jagged bits of steel scraping her calf, and continues upwards.  
  
At the top of the lighthouse, the wind is screaming like a lamb during slaughter, piercing and eerie; bent on her objective, Rose hesitates only for a moment as sudden misgiving strikes her. Softly creeping, the whispers coil gently around her brain and reassure her that this is the way, this is her destiny, that this is how she points the way. As she steps up, the stone of the quest bed is immovably solid underfoot, far from the foundering ships she’s traversed of late. It is with no small relief at this that she sits in the center of it.  
  
Rose unlaces her sneakers with rain-slick, shaking fingers and kicks them off over the edge of the quest bed. Taking her mother’s rifle in hand, she settles the barrel against the soft skin beneath her jaw and guides her trembling foot towards the butt.  
  
She curls her big toe against the trigger and pulls before she can second-guess herself.  
  
Ascension is bright and cold; ascension is brilliant and painful, a dive beneath Arctic ice. She comes to the surface gasping, prickling from imagined frostbite beneath her night-blue robes. The red-pink-white spray of her mortal skull is already being washed away by the pounding rain.  
  
Perhaps now she can win.  
  
She wraps herself in solitude and Seer’s raiment, clawing through lunatic segments of their possible-impossible future, hoping for some thread of truth among that which can never be.  
  
She sees, and strains, and lunges for some indication of reality again and again until her nose bleeds and her head throbs. Impossibilities intertwine with glimpses of a farther plane, Furthest of the Rings, and the divine intermingles with clicking beaks and barbed appendages reaching up to draw her into an inescapable embrace. The realization hits her that she has looked too long, and looked too deeply, her clumsy cannonfired perception crumbling the wall against a mental Moria of swirling blackness, and she stumbles her mind backwards into tangible reality.  
   
She closes her eyes after that, and does not look for a long while. Yet the Ring curls against her inner eye, coiled pseudopods leaving persistent afterimages on her retina, the tentacled handprints of the gods pressing blackly on her sight.  Her tongue is studded with peeping golden eyes. There is a darkness growing in her, something lean and hungry and fishscale-slick, sliding wrongly against her innards like a misplayed note in a concerto. That fleeting touch of the remote powers that be was enough to infect, to contaminate, to send a creeping crusted-in contagion into the parts of her that hunger. She feels that slithering touch down the curve of her frontal lobe and along her brainstem. There is a harder edge to her wanting, now; she notices, but pays it no mind. It’s nothing.  
  
The whispers return in force, a cacophony of wheedling and demands. Rose makes a demand of her own.  
  
 _Show me,_ she says to the Circle.  
  
They do.  
  
And she sees, in a static-warped rush of imagery, her successful counterpart, arrayed in gold and blazing sunset orange, all the fortune that ever was and ever will be flowing through her fingers like so much water. A laughing Rogue, a hero, a savior, a herald of victory, and for a moment Rose is consumed by fury at her unearned triumph. It passes, but her determination remains. She sees and finds the way, a path through the Void between snaking tentacles and shining tri-lobed eyes, and wonders for a moment if she is Red Riding Hood in this forest of abominations, or if she is the wolf.  
  
Ultimately, she decides, it does not matter ( _no, it doesn’t_ , echo the eyes on her tongue and the slithering in her belly); the jaunt is a short one for even such a small god as her, and she passes through the tattered membrane between sessions without incident. She touches down in familiar sands. The desert she has seen spreads out around her into the horizon.  
  
Her quarry turns to face her.  
  
Rose pulls back her hood to show her clustered eyes and elongated moray-eel teeth. “You do realize,” she says in her new burbling-tar voice, “that all the victories you’ve taken had to have come from somewhere.”  
  
The Rogue winces from either sympathy or disgust. “Shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t think I’d end up sending everybody else’s sessions all the way to Totally Fuckedville.”  
  
“No,” says Rose. “Just mine.” A tentacle blots out the sun, casting the two of them into shadow.  
  
“Still,” says the Rogue, “That’s totes harsh, and I am sorry. Fuck, since the Cthulhu Goon Squad decided to show up, I am _hella_ sorry.”  
  
As the stars wink out, she says quietly, “We were never gonna win, were we?”  
  
Rose takes her gently by the hand. “No,” she says, “we never were.”  
  
They stand together hand in hand  and watch their universe unravel.

**Author's Note:**

> Done for crookedbones for Ladystuck 2013; the prompt was Lalondes, Lovecraftian horror, and angst. I hope I was able to deliver, and that you enjoyed. My apologies that this is not longer; I was a bit pressed for time near the end.
> 
> Thanks to Megan and Andy for betaing this.


End file.
